What’s up with your weird name?

People either love our name BoltAffect or hate it. Either way, we have a lot of people that ask me about it. Rightfully so… it’s very weird to have a VERB in your name. And that’s the part people usually ask about.

Quick back story

I had a job as an administrative assistant in 2004. It was fun. But not all of it was fun. I started to automate the not-so-fun-parts with custom software for the engineering company I worked for. The system added efficiency to the point that a fellow secretary and myself were laid off a year later. (I don’t recommend laying off people for doing a good job).

Moral of the story

Amazon is a testament to how much customers love doing business with a software based company. But it’s a little harder to see the flip side of happy employees. That’s because only the employees get to see that part. But I assure you, just as public facing software can delight a customer, it can also delight employees. I made my job so easy it became TOO easy.

I learned an important life lesson: custom software is powerful. It can make doing business better in almost every way.

The verb

Our company got started by people that love software and saw the potential for it to make doing business better. Custom software can make business processes better. It makes customers happy and it makes employees happy.

The word affect as a verb means to influence or have an impact on something. And that’s exactly what our custom software solutions do. Custom software will positively affect the business it is deployed into.

The noun

Ah, I tricked you! Maybe our name is also a noun!

We all know that English is a terrible, terrible language. And the word affect is sometimes used as a noun, instead of a verb. We’ll call this an exception to the rule. In that case it means something entirely different (shocker). Affect as a noun means feeling, emotion, or specific emotional response. It’s usually used in psychological clinical papers and the like.

Positive affect encompasses all good emotions, such as joy, bliss, love, and contentment.
- F. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman

Grammar illustration taken from Grammarly

Good custom software produces positive affect for customers and employees.

Conclusion

Yes my internet friend, our name has deep symbolism and meaning. Or maybe we just picked two words that had the abbreviation BA so that we could say “that’s some BA software”!